As autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on real-time perception and decision-making, the demand for decentralized and efficient machine learning has intensified. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising paradigm by enabling collaborative model training across distributed edge nodes, such as vehicles, without exposing raw data. However, deploying FL in autonomous driving environments remains challenging due to the substantial communication overhead between edge devices and coordinating servers, particularly under dynamic mobility and variable-bandwidth conditions. This paper presents a communication-efficient FL framework tailored for edge-based autonomous vehicle networks. The proposed approach reduces uplink and downlink costs through optimized parameter exchange and adaptive update strategies while maintaining model accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate improved scalability and communication efficiency, highlighting the potential of FL for intelligent, connected, and resource-constrained autonomous mobility systems under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data distribution

Machine learning and deep learning are transformative forces reshaping our networks, industries, services, and ways of life. However, the susceptibility of these intelligent systems to adversarial attacks remains a significant issue. On the one hand, recent studies have demonstrated the potential transferability of adversarial attacks across diverse models. On the other hand, existing defense mechanisms are vulnerable to advanced attacks or are often limited to certain attack types. This study proposes a random deep feature selection approach to mitigate such transferability and improve the robustness of models against adversarial manipulations. Our approach is designed to strengthen deep models against poisoning (e.g., label flipping) and exploratory (e.g., DeepFool, BIM, FGSM, I-FGSM, L-BFGS, C&W, JSMA, and PGD) attacks that are applied in both the training and testing stages, and Transfer Learning-Based Adversarial Attacks. We consider scenarios involving perfect and semi-knowledgeable attackers. The performance of our approach is evaluated through extensive experiments on the renowned UNSW-NB15 dataset, including both real-world and synthetic data, covering a wide range of modern attack behaviors and benign activities. The results indicate that our approach boosts the effectiveness of the target network to over 80% against labelflipping poisoning attacks and over 60% against all major types of exploratory attacks.

The increasing need to process large, high-dimensional datasets and the substantial computational power required have made the use of distributed cloud servers essential. These servers provide cost-effective solutions that make storage and computing accessible to ordinary users. However, they might face significant vulnerabilities, including data leakage, metadata spoofing, insecure programming interfaces, malicious insiders, and denial of service. To gain public trust in distributed computing, addressing concerns related to privacy and security while ensuring high performance and efficiency is crucial. Multiparty computation, differential privacy, trusted execution environments, and federated learning are the four major approaches developed to address these issues. This survey paper reviews and compares these four approaches based on a structured framework, by highlighting recent top-tier research papers published in prestigious journals and conferences. Particular attention is given to progress in federated learning, which trains a model across multiple devices without sharing the actual data, keeping data private and secure. The survey also highlights federated learning techniques, including secure federated learning, by detecting malicious updates and privacy-preserving federated learning via data encryption, data perturbation, and anonymization, as new paradigms for building responsible computing systems. Finally, the survey discusses future research directions for connecting academic innovations with real-world industrial applications.

Accurate energy consumption forecasting is critical for optimizing energy usage, lowering operational costs, and encouraging sustainability in smart buildings. Machine learning (ML) has developed as an effective method for energy forecasting, using sensor data to anticipate consumption trends and increase efficiency. However, due to regulations such as GDPR and growing privacy concerns, sharing sensitive energy data with third parties is often prohibited, providing issues for traditional centralized ML techniques. Federated Learning (FL) provides a feasible alternative by allowing for decentralized model training across several buildings without explicitly exchanging raw data. This privacy-preserving strategy enables organizations to jointly train reliable models while retaining data sovereignty. Our experimental results demonstrate that by using the CU-BEMS dataset, both FL and centralized forecasting models perform similarly, with an R2 score of ≈ 87%. Furthermore, FL decreases bandwidth use by limiting data transfers, making it a scalable and economical energy management solution for smart buildings. These findings demonstrate FL's ability to ensure safe, data-driven decision-making for sustainable energy utilization

In smart electric grid systems, various sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are used to collect electrical data at substations. In a traditional system, a multitude of energy-related data from substations needs to be migrated to central storage, such as Cloud or edge devices, for knowledge extraction that might impose severe data misuse, data manipulation, or privacy leakage. This motivates to propose anomaly detection system to detect threats and Federated Learning to resolve the issues of data silos and privacy of data. In this article, we present a framework to identify anomalies in industrial data that are gathered from the remote terminal devices deployed at the substations in the smart electric grid system. The anomaly detection system is based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and autoencoders that employs Mean Standard Deviation (MSD) and Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) approaches for detecting anomalies. We deploy Federated Learning (FL) to preserve the privacy of the data generated by the substations. FL enables energy providers to train shared AI models cooperatively without disclosing the data to the server. In order to further enhance the security and privacy properties of the proposed framework, we implemented homomorphic encryption based on the Paillier algorithm for preserving data privacy. The proposed security model performs better with MSD approach using HE-128 bit key providing 97% F1-score and 98% accuracy for K=5 with low computation overhead as compared with HE-256 bit key. 

A critical enabler of autonomous construction equipment is object detection, a computer vision task integral to navigation, task execution, and safety. However, challenging conditions at construction sites, such as mud splashes, dirt, and vibrations, can degrade object detection performance by causing sensor occlusions and image blurriness. Traditional adversarial training methods, which enhance model robustness by using perturbed data, are limited in construction environments due to the scarcity of diverse real-world adversarial data and the dynamic nature of these sites. Additionally, privacy concerns and site-specific data variability hinder data sharing across different construction sites. To overcome these challenges, this paper explores federated learning as a solution to enhance the robustness and adaptability of object detection models while preserving data privacy. FL enables continuous online learning without direct data exchange, offering a scalable and privacy-preserving approach to training models across diverse construction environments. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves model performance on the ConstScene dataset by up to ≈ 4.4% compared to the centralized AI model for object detection. 

Anomaly detection is essential for ensuring the safe and efficient operation of industrial systems like smart grids. Smart grid stations handle sensitive data and are often hesitant to share it with third-party servers for centralized anomaly detection. Federated Learning (FL) offers a viable solution to this issue by enhancing anomaly detection in smart grids without compromising data privacy. We present a method for developing an unsupervised anomaly detection system using FL applied to a synthetic dataset that mimics a real-world smart grid system’s behavior. We focus on utilizing FL’s long short-term memory autoencoder in short, LSTM-AE for anomaly detection. However, there are concerns about potential privacy breaches in the FL system. Hence, to address this issue, we propose to integrate differential privacy (DP) with FL for anomaly detection by adding artificial noise to parameters at the client side before aggregation. This method ensures data privacy while maintaining the convergence of federated learning algorithms. Moreover, this research determines the optimal privacy level to balance noise scale and model accuracy. Our findings suggest a criterion for selecting the right privacy budget of DP based on the requirement of the system to provide good level of privacy in the system while maintaining the f1-score of FL-based anomaly detection system greater than 90%.

Context: Detecting fatigue in drivers has become increasingly important for safe driving, especially with the use of more smart devices and Internet-connected vehicles. While sharing data between vehicles can enhance fatigue detection systems, privacy concerns pose significant barriers to this sharing process. We propose a Federated Learning (FL) approach for monitoring fatigue-driven behavior to address these challenges. However, there is a concern that the drivers’ private information might be leaked in the FL system. In this paper, we introduce PRIV-DRIVE, a novel approach for privacy-enhanced fatigue detection applications. Our method integrates Paillier homo-morphic encryption (PHE) with a top-k parameter selection technique, bolstering privacy and confidentiality in federated fatigue detection systems. This approach reduces communication and computation overhead while ensuring model accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to implement PHE in FL setups for fatigue detection applications. We ran several experiments and evaluated the PRIV-DRIVE method. The results show substantial efficiency gains with different HE key sizes, reducing computation time by up to 96% and communication traffic by up to 95%. Importantly, these improvements have minimal impact on accuracy, effectively meeting the requirements of fatigue detection applications. 

ABSTRACT. Anomaly detection is critical in industrial systems such as smart grid systems to guarantee their safe and effective operation. The smart grid stations contain sensitive data, and they are concerned about sharing it with a third-party server to establish a centralized anomaly detection system. Federated Learning (FL) is a feasible solution to these problems for enhancing anomaly detection in smart grid systems. This study describes a method for developing an unsupervised anomaly detection based on FL system using a synthetic dataset based on real-world grid system behavior. The paper investigates the usage of FL’s long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM-AE) for anomaly detection. For more accurate identification, this research explores the performance of integrating LSTM-AE with one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) and isolation forest (IF) and compares their results with a threshold-based anomaly detection approach. Moreover, an approach is described for generating synthetic anomalies with different levels of difficulty to evaluate the robustness of the anomaly detection FL model. The FL models results are compared with the centralized version of the models as a baseline and the results show that FL models outperformed the centralized approach by detecting higher outlier data by achieving 99% F1-Score.

Context: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is a valuable technology that identifies human emotions from spoken language, enabling the development of context-aware and personalized intelligent systems. To protect user privacy, Federated Learning (FL) has been introduced, enabling local training of models on user devices. However, FL raises concerns about the potential exposure of sensitive information from local model parameters, which is especially critical in applications like SER that involve personal voice data. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) has prevented privacy leaks in image and video data. However, it encounters notable accuracy degradation when applied to speech data, especially in the presence of high noise levels. In this paper, we propose an approach called LDP-FL with CSS, which combines LDP with a novel client selection strategy (CSS). By leveraging CSS, we aim to improve the representatives of updates and mitigate the adverse effects of noise on SER accuracy while ensuring client privacy through LDP. Furthermore, we conducted model inversion attacks to evaluate the robustness of LDP-FL in preserving privacy. These attacks involved an adversary attempting to reconstruct individuals' voice samples using the output labels provided by the SER model. The evaluation results reveal that LDP-FL with CSS achieved an accuracy of 65-70%, which is 4% lower than the initial SER model accuracy. Furthermore, LDP-FL demonstrated exceptional resilience against model inversion attacks, outperforming the non-LDP method by a factor of 10. Overall, our analysis emphasizes the importance of achieving a balance between privacy and accuracy in accordance with the requirements of the SER application.